Welcome to the June
edition of CATS e-news.CATS
10th Anniversary event! CATS is celebrating it's 10th Anniversary this year, and
we plan to hold an event to mark this on Friday 29th October here at LSE. Please
keep the date in your diaries (it will most likely be afternoon and early
evening), and look out for further news over the coming months.

Nicola Ranger co-chaired a
session and spoke at NATO ARW workshop on Climate Change: Global Change and
Local Adaptation, 6
– 9th June in Hella, Iceland. This event was
successful and she is now contributing to two book Chapters for a new
Springer book on adaptation decision making as an outcome to the
conference.

Falk Niehoerster will be
attending the Willis
Research Network Meeting titled "Extreme Weather & Climate
Liaison Group Meeting with WMO" on 7th and 8th of July.

Joe Daron and Alex Jarman will
be attending the Royal Meteorological Society Student Conference at the Met
Office in Exeter
from 8th July to 10th July. Joe is on the organising committee for the
conference.

Dave Stainforth is attending a
workshop on "Better use of climate science: innovative approaches and
tools for promoting more effective dialogue between scientists and policy
makers" on Friday 9th July. This is at the Natural Environment
Research Council in Swindon and is a joint workshop involving, amongst
others: NERC, the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences, the
International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society's
Climate Centre, the Institute
of Development Studies
and the Humanitarian Futures Programme.

Max Fehr and Pauline Barrieu are
organising two sessions for the "Energy and Emission Markets" stream of the EURO XXIV (24th European
Conference on Operational Research), in Lisbon, July 11-14.

Du, HL and Smith, LA: "Improvement
in Full Probability Forecasting at Seasonal Lead-times"under revision for Quarterly
Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

Papers in
preparation include:

Nicola Ranger is contributing as
an author on a multi-institutional and multi-national report led by UNEP on
international emissions targets to feed into the UNFCCC negotiations this year,
along with Alex Bowen, Bob Ward and Chris Taylor (all Grantham). This is an
outcome of our December policy briefings on emissions targets.

Dr Nicola Ranger and Trevor
Maynard at Lloyd's of London have been collaborating on a paper which
discusses whether long-term general insurance policies would be a-priori
more expensive than short term policies. Their initial work suggests that
this would be the case generally due to typical global regulatory capital
requirements. Ranger and Maynard have shared their work with Howard
Kunreuther of Wharton and visiting Professor at the LSE and continue to
debate this topic in the context of Climate Change adaptation.

Nicola also has three papers at
final review stage for Climate Change:

Du, HL and Smith, LA: "Rising
Above Chaotic Likelihoods" in preparation for Journal of the American
Statistical Association.

Jochen Broecker is writing a
chapter for Jolliffe & Stephenson's book on forecast verification (2nd
edition).

Roland Young, Roman Binter, Falk
Niehoerster, Leonard Smith, and Peter Read also have two
papers on the annulus in preparation:
"Shadowing in intermediate-dimensional systems. I - Limits of
iota-shadowing using the perfect model rotating annulus" and "Shadowing
in intermediate-dimensional systems. II - Demonstration of gradient descent
for a rotating annulus model in the perfect model scenario".

Jochen is also preparing a
series of lectures on geophysical fluid dynamics together with Holger Kantz.

Arthur Petersen was involved in the
co-ordination of a Dutch governmental evaluation of the quality of the regional
chapters of the IPCC AR4 WG II report (on impacts, adaptation and
vulnerability). The report “Assessing an IPCC Assessment: An Analysis of
Statements on Projected Regional Impacts in the 2007 Report” was published
by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in July. A news piece on
the report was published in Nature, Volume 466-Number 7303, on 08 July 2010
"Few
fishy facts found in climate report".

Milena Cuellaris collaborating with Ed Spiegel
and one of his graduate students at ColumbiaUniversity
on the Uncertainty in the prediction of Sunspots. "In the project we
explore and attempt to assess the uncertainty components of observational
sunspot information and model adequacy, to produce predictions of the solar
cycle".

Max Fehr, Pauline
Barrieu and Umut Cetincontinue their work on a model for risk neutral futures price
dynamics in the European Unions Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).
Historical price dynamics suggest that both allowance prices for different
compliance periods and CER prices for different compliance periods are
significantly related. To obtain a realistic price dynamics we take into
account the specific details of the EU ETS compliance regulations, such as
banking and the link to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and exploit
arbitrage relationships between futures on EU allowances and Certified
Emission Reductions.

Falk Niehoerster, Nicola
Ranger, and Leonard Smith continue work on Hurricanes: the predictability of
Hurricane frequency and intensity is investigated on seasonal to
multi-decadal timescales. Comparison and verification of different
statistical approaches are conducted in addition to expert elicitation. The
goal is to generate scenarios of future development of Hurricane activities
for adaptation decision making.

Roman Binter,
Hailiang Du, Falk Niehoerster and Leonard Smith work on Seasonal to Decadal
Predictability: The predictability of important atmospheric phenomena is
investigated in seasonal to decadal (s2d) predictions produced in the
multi-model framework of the ENSEMBLES project. Impact relevant indices
like the sea surface temperature (SST) in the main development region for
hurricanes (MDR) and the Nino3.4 index (related to the El Nino phenomenon)
as well as the global mean temperature (GMT) are currently the focus of the
analysis.

Falk Niehoerster
and Leonard Smith
work on SVD on ICE - Linearity questions in climate modelling: The question
of linearity in general circulation model (GCM) simulations of global
warming as a function of a increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration is
another focus. The assumption that climate response is "linear"
is widely used and multiply defined. Indeed, the assumption of linearity is
crucial for several applications of climate science including pattern
scaling. The extent to which linearity approximations hold is evaluated in
large (~2^9)) initial condition ensembles (ICE). These simulations consider
the equilibrium response of HadSM3 to three different levels of CO2
concentration increase. By comparing the singular value decomposition (SVD)
and the leading singular vectors of the three initial condition ensembles
we evaluate not only the relevance of the linearity assumption, but also
the robustness of the principal pattern of temperature change. See poster
presented at IMSC, "SVD
on ICE - On the linearity of climate change simulation with GCMs"

Visitors

Dr Swenja
Surminski,
Adviser Climate Change, Association of British Insurers, has been appointed
a Visiting Senior Fellow to CATS. She is advising the ABI on climate change
mitigation and adaptation. Key areas of work are climate impacts,
mitigation policies, and the role of insurance in the climate change
context. She has co-ordinated the ABI’s response to the 2007 summer floods
in the UK and sits on various research steering groups, guiding the
knowledge exchange between climate scientist and the insurance industry.
She is involved in several governmental working groups, representing the
views of the industry. Swenja is a member of the Management Committee of
the industry’s ClimateWise initiative, of the European Insurance Industry
Climate Change Taskforce (CEA) and of the London Climate Change Partnership
Steering Group. She has been advising on climate change risks at UN, EU and
UK
level and is the author of several papers on these topics.
Prior to taking up this role in April 2007, Swenja was working in the Risk
Management division of insurance broker Marsh McLennon and in the
Geoscience Team at Munich Reinsurance Company.
Swenja was a Fulbright Scholar in the US,
studying Environmental Economics and International Relations at the University of New Hampshire. Swenja received a PhD
in Economics/Political Science from HamburgUniversity
for her work on ‘Climate Change and the Insurance Industry’ in 2000.

Dr James Springham, also from UWA, visited CATS at
the beginning of June

CATS Visiting
Fellow, Jerome Ellepola has moved from the Position of Upstream Petroleum Economist with
Shell UK E&P to join the new Shell Projects& Technology
Organisation in the Netherlands.
His new role is in Network Masterplanning and Optimisation in the new Shell
Projects and Technology Organisation in Holland.
As an Economist he supported operational and commercial decisions on the
portfolio and major assets in the UKCS (e.g. Brent-Penguins,Nelson etc) on
late life field redevelopment strategies and decommissioning. In his new
role he will be part of an integrated team developing network masterplans
(Crude Oil/Gas/Power/CO2 etc). He will also be part of a team designing and
optimising the next generation of manufacturing plants through the
application of MINLP and NLP techniques based on yields and lifecycle
Economic KPIs.

Professor
Keith Beven,
Professor of Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics at Lancaster Environment Centre,
has been appointed a Visiting Professor to CATS. He made a first visit to
CATS on Wednesday 30th June, for a day of informal talks/discussions
on model uncertainty.

Jochen Broecker,a Postdoc at MPI, Dresden,visited
CATS on 24th May.

A list of all current CATS
Visiting Fellows and Professors can be found here

Dr Swenja Surminski

Where are
they now?Our
regular end piece of where ex-CATS members are now.

Roland Young, who was a Research Officer at
CATS last year, is back in Oxford
where he did his D.Phil., working as a postdoc in Peter Read's group. He
has moved from studying the rotating annulus to studying the dynamics of
giant planet atmospheres (specifically Jupiter and Saturn) using general
circulation models.

Anna Andrianovacompleted her PhD at CATS,
thesis title: "Incorporating weather forecasts into the energy
markets". More info to follow soon we hope!

Ron Batesis currently working at Rolls
Royce. He was a senior Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics and
CATS from 2003 to 2008, working with Henry Wynn on a number of European and
EPSRC funded projects.

Neil Bathiacompleted his PhD earlier this
year, thesis title: "Factor modelling for high dimensional time".
He is currently doing a postdoc with Prof. Peter Hall in the Maths
department at the University
of Melbourne and he
is working on problems in high dimensional data analysis and model
selection.

Roman Binter is finishing his phd thesis, and
began work with Penson GHCO at the beginning of May. We hope to organise a
proper leaving do for Roman soon....watch this space!

Jochen Broecker works at the Max Planck
Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. We are very happy to announce
that Jochen got married on 24th April!
Jochen was a Research Officer at CATS from 2003 to 2007, working on a
number of projects including the EU project ENSEMBLES and the EPSRC project
DIME.

Liam Clarke is working at the Financial
Services Authority, London.
He was a Research Officer at CATS from 2003 to 2008, working on the EPSRC
funded project REMIND
and then the NERC funded project NAPSTER.

Reason Machete is currently a Research
Assistant in Mathematical Modeling for the Digital Economy in the
Mathematics Department at the University
of Reading. He was a
Research Assistant in CATS from 2007 to 2010, working on a number of
different CATS projects.

Milena Cuellar isnow an Adjunct
Assistant Professor at CUNY Bronx's Community College. She's teaching Math
to first year college students.
She completed her PhD at CATS funded by NGT. Thesis title: "Time
series analysis, model parameters estimation."

Edward Tredgercompleted his PhD in 2009,
thesis title: "What can Insurers learn from Climate Models?"
Edward is now working at Defra.

Hugo
Maruri-Aguilar
is now lecturing in the Statistics Department at Queen Mary, University of London. He was a Research Officer on
the EPSRC funded project, MUCM,
from 2006 to 2009, working with Henry Wynn.

Antje Weisheimeris at the European Centre for
Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) in Reading, and we're very please to
announce that she has just had a new baby! Antje was an EC Marie Curie
Postdoctoral Fellow at CATS from 2002 to 2003. She was working on
predictability in large climate models.